


She-Wolf

by NoelleAngelFyre



Series: Tiger, Tiger [18]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse/Trauma, Coming-of-age, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, First-Time Murder, Gen, Psychological Trauma, Unresolved Emotional Damage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 13:38:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4831064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoelleAngelFyre/pseuds/NoelleAngelFyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A lost pup becomes a wolf.  A little girl becomes a woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	She-Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> Set during episode 21 and 22, working parallel with "Unraveled". This was probably the hardest one for me to write, of ALL the works I've written for this series. Psychological trauma/torture is not for the faint of heart.

It’s cold.

Winter in Gotham is always cold; the sun rarely blinks through the heavy clouds, and at night, when it becomes dark, the temperature drops and the blood seems to freeze within the veins. But tonight, it seems especially cold. Her body feels frozen, submerged in ice. It’s cold, and it’s hard to move. But she must. She has to move. She has to _run_.

The cold isn’t the only thing weighing down her body; just moving from one side to the other sends a violent surge of pain through the nerves, enough to make her want to scream. But she can’t scream, and she can’t slow down. She has to move, and she has to move _now_.

The cabin reeks of gasoline; she can hear and see smoke curling up from what’s left of the car hood—what little isn’t smashed and curled up against the trunk of a tree, twisted and mangled at several odd angles—and where there is steam and gasoline, fire can be close behind. If she doesn’t move now, she’ll be trapped permanently and burn to death. Maybe she should be in the grasp of hellfire right now, but damned if she’ll give the Devil a chance to claim her without a fight.

She kicks at the passenger window, three times, with all the force she can muster in her bruised limbs; the heel of her shoe works against the already-fractured glass, and it shatters on the fourth kick. Climbing out of the window rips into her clothes, her skin, her palms and legs; the stinging pain follows quickly, and then she can feel the blood…

_…dripping downward, dribbling across naked skin, one stream mixing and mingling with the other, the pain from one wound indistinguishable from the other. There’s one on her upper left thigh, three more on her right leg, two on each arm, and at least twelve on her back. Maybe more. She’s lost count by now._

_“You are amazing, Iris.” He whispers, staring deeply into her eyes; she looks back, and she sees empty pits on a handsome face. The face of a prince, sent from fairytales to rescue the fair princess. But his is the face of a monster. And it is hideous, vile, disgusting. “Truly, amazing. The rest…they quivered and whimpered and trembled, just at the sight of a knife. But you…”_

_His hands lift to cradle her face; she twists away with a sharp snarl, but he isn’t deterred. “It’s alright, Iris. It’s alright. I know, I made a mistake. I didn’t realize how special you were. I’ll make this right. I’ll make it right for us.”_

She can’t run in the heels; the frost-covered ground of the woods—she doesn’t even know where, exactly, they are, not with the darkness blotting out any discernible details—will be vicious and unforgiving against her bare feet, but she can’t think of that now. She doesn’t have time to whimper or flinch. She kicks the heels away and starts running.

The darkness steals her sight; the pain of her fresh wounds and the stinging throb of the healing wounds is distracting, almost overwhelming; the cold threatens to slow her pace. She can’t let any of it matter. She has to keep running. She has to keep running. If she doesn’t—

His hands grab her from behind, clutching gracelessly at whatever clothing or limbs happen to be within easy reach, yanking and jerking, trying to get her down, to get her back into his clutches, growling when she fights him, with nails blindly clawing. She feels her fingers make contact with his flesh, at least five times. Her resistance only seems to enrage him further.

“Why are you fighting me?” he demands; her lip splits when he strikes her, twice, across the face. “I’m doing this for you. For _us_! Don’t you see, Iris? You’re the one. _You’re the one_!”

The one. She’s _the one_ , the perfect mate he’s been seeking all these years, victim after victim after victim, each one murdered without a thought and tossed out like trash. But she’s different. She’s the one. The one he captured initially for torture, but no, that didn’t last, not when he realized the truth and saw just how perfect she was. He’d made a mistake, he’d done her wrong, and he had to start over. She had heard these words, over and over again, while he’d taken her out of the apartment, helped her into the car like a gentleman, and started to drive. A road trip, he’d said, with such a smile that it was all she could do to not vomit her stomach dry. A road trip, a romantic little drive, a late-night adventure to start anew, to kindle the flame of romance. It was something out of a pretty fairytale, and once he got them to the desired destination, he would have control again, and she’d never escape.

That, and that alone, had been her thought, the last spark of encouragement cracking through the delirium of pain and dehydration and three weeks without any other human contact. Escape now, or lose her chance forever. A car crash had been messy, but it had been her only chance. And she’d taken it.

He has the knife at her throat, pressing deeper and deeper into her skin; she won’t stop struggling, and at some point she feels the blade rip through. It’s uneven, rough, and every writhing thrash of her body, seeking escape no matter the cost, only cuts it deeper. If she doesn’t get free of his hold soon, he’ll hit an artery and she’ll bleed to death, alone, in the cold.

“Stop fighting me!” he hisses in her ear; she has a fighting hold on his hand, trying and trying and trying to just get free, get the knife away before she dies right here, right now. “It’s all for you, Iris. It’s all for you. I love you. I love you more than anyone ever could!”

The fatigue, the exhaustion, the ache of her wounds and her battered body, fades away with a violent rush of rage. Not irritation, not frustration, not anger, but pure rage. There is no comparison to this emotion, no word that can really describe it, not properly that someone could ever comprehend it, but it takes her over in a crushing blow that shatters rational thought.

Her head snaps back and collides with his face; she can vaguely hear his nose crack and his consequent yelp of pain. It loosens his grip, and at some point, she realizes the knife is in her hand. She doesn’t realize it immediately, not until she’s on her knees above him, the feel of fresh blood pumping hot and fast over her fingers, over her hand, the metallic stench burning in her nostrils, and the sickening sound of flesh splitting beneath the blade. Over, and over, and over, and over, and over…

“You do not love me.” She can hear what sounds like someone screaming, the words preceding every blow, every downward descent of the knife into living flesh. “You do not love me. _You do not love me_!!”

A loud crack rips through the air, like a bone shattering, and suddenly her arm is stuck. No, her arm isn’t stuck. She’s holding the knife, and the knife is stuck. The knife is lodged deep in his throat. She can hear the sickening gurgle of a dying man, ringing in her ears, so very close, and his body is growing still beneath her. Still, and cold, and dead.

She killed him. She just killed someone.

Her fingers are stiff, clenched tight around the hilt, and it takes a few minutes before she can actually unwrap them. The skin feels tight, sticky. The blood is drying on her skin. His blood. The blood of the man she just killed. The man who kidnapped her, imprisoned her, tortured her, starved her, and then tried to romance and seduce her. And she’s killed him.

She quickly rolls over, away from him, falls forward on her hands, and lets the nausea take over. Her body heaves violently; each retch sounds like a scream to her ears, her throat burns, her lip stings, and tears stream thick down her cheeks. After three weeks of minimal water, bare scraps of food, and a knife carving deep into her flesh and muscle, her body has no tolerance and no resilience. By the time she’s emptied her stomach, her limbs cave and she barely avoids collapsing in her own vomit before dropping to the ground, gasping for breath, coughing, and crying. The tears she hasn’t shed over these past weeks, the grief and anguish and emotional agony she has suffered in silence, come out without containment. Her sobs echo in the cold night air, heard only by the heavens, and the sky has no comfort to offer. Only silence.

***

The daylight is bright and cold. Her eyes burn and she can barely see; each step is unsteady, awkward, her feet burning and aching, and her legs shaking beneath her. Whatever grace she once possessed in her stride is gone; she’s reduced to walking by leaning against tree and brush, stumbling when she tries to walk without support, and often dropping to her knees without anything there to catch her.

Logic and education guides her through the process: she is dehydrated, she is hungry, she is in pain and poorly clothed for the elements, she has no shelter save what little Nature can provide, and she has endured multiple emotional and physical traumas in the past weeks, one after the other after the other. Her body has already begun breaking down muscle mass and fat, just to sustain itself; her mind will soon suffer from delirium, possibly even hallucinations. She simply must remain focused, keep what’s left of her sanity intact, and find her way home. She has to. If she starts to succumb to her internal injuries, she will quickly succumb to the elements, and she’ll die.

She can’t die. Not here, not like this. She can’t. She won’t.

***

She loses track of the days very quickly; it’s similar to being in solitary confinement, though she at least has the benefit of seeing the sun rise and fall, which is the only way she knows time is still turning and the days are still passing. But she loses count after two. It is unlikely she has been out here for a week, but anything is possible. She wouldn’t know any different.

Her grip on logic is also quickly deteriorating. She sleeps terribly at night, not because of the cold or the hunger, but because she begins to feel eyes on her that aren’t there, and hear wisps of whispers that don’t exist. She knows they don’t exist because she recognizes the voices, and their owners are long-since dead and buried. They aren’t here, not with her, because they are not alive.

She manages to cling to that simple truth for two, perhaps even three days. But as time passes, her mental and physical health continue declining—there is nothing here to eat, not in the dead of winter, and she is only hydrating by sucking fluid from the icicles and snow—and the voices are growing louder, and now she is seeing images, faces…

She has always wondered, with detached scientific interest, what insanity feels like. _Be careful what you wish for._

As the sun begins to set, she curls against a tree, wraps her limbs tightly together, and waits for the inevitable cold to set in. It has become a pattern: wander throughout the day, with some absurd rationalization that she might know where she’s going, and then conserve body warmth as much as possible during the night. She regularly massages her fingers and feet, forcing circulation to continue before she loses them to frostbite. The old-fashioned skirt and sweater—she shudders even now to consider just to whom these items might have previously belonged—provide some warmth, but after days of wear, they are losing what little protection they once offered. But it is better than nothing; she would die far sooner without them.

“ _Poor little thing. Lost and alone._ ”

She closes her eyes, locking her fingers into fists, and jerks her head, as though it will clear away the horrible sound of a woman’s voice, laced with a French accent and cold satisfaction at her suffering. _No._ Not now.

“ _No? You think this is a magic spell, little girl? You always believed you were more than you are._ ”

She presses her forehead down into her knees. She hums little tunes, one after the other after the other, and recites poetry, and asks questions—riddles—and answers them herself. She doesn’t sleep tonight; if she sleeps, she will hear the voice again. It seems to work, at least throughout the night, but once the sun rises, something worse happens. She doesn’t just hear the voice. She sees its owner.

“You are dead.” She manages to whisper, as she forces herself to stand and walk, determined to pass by as though the figure before her doesn’t matter. What’s left of rational thought reminds her it is a futile thing; this woman is a hallucination, nothing more. Even if she walks past, her mind will recreate the image, over and over. Walking doesn’t change that, and talking to something that doesn’t exist won’t change anything either. She knows this. She knows better.

“ _And you are not?_ ” red lips curl into a cruelly-amused smirk, dark eyebrows arching in turn. “ _Look at you. Already half a skeleton, now the walking dead. You would save yourself the exhaustion if you just laid down and went to sleep._ ”

“I will not die out here.” Iris replies; it’s ridiculous to be carrying on this conversation, and she knows it. This woman is dead. She is _dead_. “Especially not with you.”

“ _You talk as though you are rid of me._ ” Now, she laughs, and Iris flinches at the sound. “ _Foolish little girl. I created you. I carried you in my body, and now you think you are rid of me?_ ”

“You tried to kill me.” A violent shiver takes her body, and she has to stop walking while drawing in sharp, broken breaths for lungs that won’t be filled. Each gasp, each attempted inhale only result in a vicious cough that cuts her throat and brings tears to her eyes. She can feel the amusement even if she refuses to meet the green eyes staring down at her. “Year after year, you told me of how many times you tried to kill me, before I was even born.”

“ _You have killed yourself, little girl._ ” The woman—no, she’s not real, _she’s not real_ —declares, with a dramatic sigh. “ _I told you love was a weakness. You should have listened to me. I gave you a mother’s great wisdom, and you threw it back in my face. So rude. So ungrateful to your mother._ ”

“You are a liar.” Iris hisses, rubbing desperately at her throat, trying to soothe the burning.

“ _Am I?_ ” Maria’s eyes flash, like the snow beneath sunlight. “ _Look around, little girl. Where is your devoted lover now? Tell me this. Where is he? I will tell you where he is._ ”

“Shut up….”

“ _Away from here, safe in a warm place, without a thought for you in his head._ ” Maria’s voice sounds like nails scraping the chalkboard, a horrid and incessant rasp against her ears with poisonous words trying to infect her mind. “ _No doubt, with another in his bed._ ”

“Shut up.”

Maria smiles; she remembers that smile, every last detail of its cruelty, its sick satisfaction, and knowing what words will follow with that smile in place can only be the last ones she wants to hear. “ _Do you think he has spoken the words to her, my precious girl? Do you think he has promised love to her? Why would he not? What about **you** could he ever love?_ ”

“Shut _up_!” her scream only erupts fire within her throat, and she drops to her knees, clutching at her neck and coughing until blood falls in small drops from her parted lips. She can taste it when she tries to swallow and only ends up coughing, yet again.

“ _You are alone, dearest daughter._ ” Maria whispers, as though kneeling very close, and she almost feels a cold hand pressing through her hair, pinching down into her scalp. “ _And you will die alone._ ”

***

 _One…two…three…four…five…six?_ Yes, six. Six days. Nearly a week. She has been wandering the woods, in the middle of winter, for nearly a week. By all accounts, she should be dead. There are days when she wishes, with all her heart, she was.

She suffers the presence, the constant belittling and vicious words, of not one but both parents, increasingly so as the days drag on and her body succumbs little by little. Sometimes, they say nothing, sometimes they speak to her and she speaks in return. The days when they are silent prove the worst; she feels their eyes upon her like fire, like ice, like poison. It is easier to endure their words, because she at least knows how to respond in kind. But in silence, they are simply there, ever present, ever at her side, in her mind, existing for no other purpose than to torment her. Those are the moments when she wishes for death. Those are the moments when she feels like a little girl again, seated directly between them, and together, they were her jailers and her prison cell.

At the end of the sixth day, her body exhausted and her mind unraveled like a tattered sewing project, the only thing keeping her upright is the nearest tree. And even now, in a state of humiliating weakness, her demons persist. Hell is much colder than she ever thought it would be, but there is no mistaking her circumstances. She is in Hell. Even if it is her own version, one made especially for her, it is Hell. And yet she can still feel pain and her heart still beats, so she must be alive. She’s not sure if it would be kinder to rot away in death, or let her mind turn against her, bit by bit, and drive her to the point where Hell becomes the greatest reprieve of her life.

“ _Why do you fight it, Iris?_ ” Marcus’ voice sounds exasperated, as though she is causing him great annoyance with her refusal to collapse and die. “ _Death will be much kinder if you surrender now._ ”

“I would suffer a hundred more days this way than die with your voice in my head.” She whispers, clutching, clawing at the tree bark as she forces her legs to cooperate. No part of her body wants to accommodate her insistence to keep moving; each step feels as though she has a stone strapped to each ankle. A stone, and an iron chain.

“ _Is that any way to talk to your father, young lady?_ ”

She laughs. It is a bitter, halfway hysterical sound devoid of any amusement, and there is nothing truly funny about her situation, the fact that she’s at Death’s door, or the way she has so thoroughly lost a grip on reality that she’s been carrying on conversation with her dead parents for three days. “You are not my father.”

“ _I brought you into this world—_ ”

“—And you tried to take me from it.”

He shrugs. “ _You sound so ungrateful for it. I was only thinking of you, my daughter._ ”

“Liar.”

“ _What greater act of mercy would you suggest?_ ” he asks, as though wounded by her words—no, _no_ , this is all in her head…none of it is real. “ _Look at yourself now. Look back at all you have suffered without mercy and without compassion. Look at the life you are fighting for. Gotham is a cruel mistress, Iris, and she has grown bored with you. She wants you dead._ ”

“As did you.” It’s all in her head, and she’s still carrying on this damned conversation. _What_ is wrong with her?

A foolish question: she is losing her mind. Frankly, she’s already lost it. She wonders how long it will be before she completely falls over the edge and loses what little grasp on reality she still has. Surely it can’t be long, not now.

“ _I wanted to save you. Protect you. I am your father. It is my duty to keep my little girl safe._ ”

She stops, leans heavily against another tree, forces her burning lungs to take in air for a moment, then exhales slowly. Another minute passes in silence, while she presses her forehead against the bark, hard. When she feels the pressure become unbearable, when she feels the tender skin of her brow break and bleed, she is relieved. Alright. She’s not dead. Not yet. She is very close to insane, but she is not dead.

“Is that the kind of man you think you are?” she whispers, staring blankly ahead, to the miles and miles of woodland, without a roadmap, without posted directions, nothing but dead leaves and dirt beneath a thin layer of frost. “The kind who protects his child with determination, with his heart…with his life?”

Slowly, swallowing back a wave of pain-induced nausea at the mere motion, she turns and molds her spine against the cracking bark, her gaze turning from the empty path ahead to the vision before her. He looks nothing like he did that night; her mind has created him too pristine, too composed and elegant, a world apart from the under-dressed man who came into her room and held a gun to her head. She wants to rip it apart, to make him the broken and hideous vision he really is, in life and in death. He doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a man.

“Let me tell you what kind of man you are.” She continues, in the same soft whisper. “You are a spineless coward. You are the kind of man who trapped himself in a loveless marriage because he could not control something as simple as base lust. You are the kind of man who treats women as whores and yet cannot even control his own wife. You are the kind of man who brought a child into this world and then treated her like a little doll, dressing her up and putting her on display and then beating her again and again and again and again behind closed doors until you grew tired of abusing her. You are the kind of man who sucks the life out of everything and everyone you touch. And for what?”

He blinks at her. There is no impact to her words; he doesn’t possess a soul to crush or a heart to break. He isn’t real. And yet he is. He is dead and buried and yet he is so very real. Even in death, she can’t escape him.

“ _You gave your heart to the devil._ ” He murmurs. “ _And for what?_ ”

For what? For _everything_. Without him, life has no meaning. Life means nothing, the world should stop existing, and time should stop moving onward, if _he_ does not exist in it. He can exist without her; that’s fine. She would die for him, if it meant he could keep living. She is not needed. She is not necessary in this world. She can die. But she has to make sure _he_ will continue to live. She cannot die in vain, if it was not _for him_.

“ _Such a love-struck heart she has._ ” Maria’s voice emits from the cold air, like the hiss of steam, like mist; Iris doesn’t understand why she too is perfect, beautiful, perched on a stump in a white lace dress as though preparing for a photo shoot. Why are the people she detests most in the world, those now dead and rotting below ground, appearing with such perfection? Is this her mind’s way of mocking what she already knows, that she is a ruined mess, covered in blood, dirty, starving, exhausted, injured, battered and bruised?

“ _A heart for love._ ” Maria continues, shaking her head with a dramatic sigh. “ _We have failed her, Marcus. A lifetime watching us should have been enough to show her: love is a petty dream for the foolish and empty-headed, nothing more._ ”

“You are wrong.” She whispers; there is no conviction or energy left in her voice. It doesn’t even sound like her own.

“ _Then why are you here, waiting for Death like a suitor,_ ” Maria’s lips, once again, thin into a bitter smile, “ _and he is not at your side? Where is your noble lover, Iris? Where is your tiger in the night?_ ”

“Stop.” She hisses; it may be meaningless, useless in the grand scheme of things, but the spark of fury is enough to fuel her fire a while longer. Whatever cruel tricks her mind plays on her, it will _not_ defile and desecrate that title. No one calls him that. Only her. He is _her_ tiger. No one else has the right to speak those words, not even a wicked image conjured by her starving sanity.

The cold smile only grows. “ _Such devotion…_ ” Maria croons; in the time it takes Iris to blink, her mother disappears from the stump and reappears before her, green eyes empty and red lips smiling so vilely, “ _My precious little baby and her bleeding heart…_ ” 

It’s nothing but a chilled caress, but watching Maria’s hand rise and her fingertips glide down her throat to her chest feels like ice trickling through her veins and pooling around her heart, infecting her lungs. Suddenly, she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe.

“ _I will enjoy watching._ ” Maria whispers. “ _Watching as this pretty little heart bleeds itself dry. I will enjoy watching you cry out for your tiger while Death takes you in his arms. I hope you **scream**._ ”

She runs. Her body has no energy left, and her legs burn as she forces them into motion, but she has to run. She can’t stop. She can’t stay. She must run. Run away from her memories, from the splintering wounds that have never fully healed, from the demons that are never truly silent…just run. Run as though she can ever outrun Death. Run as though somehow, someway, she will be found. It’s a foolish thought, a dream never fully realized before it shatters inside her fractured heart. No one is looking for her. No one is coming for her. She is alone. She might as well be dead.

Running through the woods at night is a losing proposition. She knows it. This is when predators come out to hunt, when any poor soul lost within this place would be at a disadvantage. She is even worse; she is in no condition to fight or defend herself. She cannot outrun any animal that possesses a desire to hunt her, catch her, and devour her. She is only causing further injury to herself, running blindly across stones, tree roots, branches catching her clothes and skin, ripping both without effort and without regret. She is bleeding, again. There are hunters in these woods, they can smell blood, and she is bleeding.

Her ankle catches something—perhaps a lone tree root, perhaps a wayward stone—and she falls. She falls downward, not just to the ground, but down, down, down…a hill, or a cliff. Her body tumbles without control over loose dirt and snow, crashes gracelessly against rocks and scattered tree parts, dismembered from their foundations, and with each new fall she feels bruises form, her skin breaking open again and again. If Gotham is a cruel mistress, then these woods are her ally, punishing anyone who enters, without mercy.

Finally, she finds solid ground and her fall ends. Every inch of her is throbbing; the pain is enough to make her sick, again, but there is nothing to expel. Her stomach retches, at least three times, but it’s only dry heaves and a coughing fit that leaves her, yet again, with the bitter taste of blood on her tongue. What doesn’t hurt, tingles as though she has had volts of electricity applied to bare skin. She can barely breathe; she doesn’t think anything is broken, but right now the pain is so overwhelming that she probably couldn’t tell the difference even if she was in her right mind. Which she is not.

The sky is dark tonight. The moon has not graced a starless sky with its presence; there is only ink-black above her and around her. Darkness. Darkness, and cold. It’s cold. So very, very cold.

At some point, she feels tears creeping down her cheeks, but they are cold and heavy and freeze to her skin before falling away, infusing and molding once more to their origins. Over and over, she cries in silence, and then recycles her tears. At least they are not wasted.

“ _Why?_ ” she can hear James’ voice, a distant echo from the farthest reaches of her memory, barely audible and yet never clearer. “ _Why? Why do you always choose **him**? What hold does he have over you, Iris? **What** could you possibly owe him?_ ”

“I love him.” She whispers. The tears come, once more, with thicker streams that pool within her eyes and render her blind. Eventually, she closes her eyes because it requires far too much effort to keep them open, and there is nothing left to see. She has no desire to look Death in the eye when he comes for her. She’s lost the will to be defiant.

Throughout the silence of a dark, cold night, she can hear the wolves. They’re singing. _Such a beautiful song._

***

“ _Get up._ ”

She hears the words but doesn’t respond. Her eyes stay closed, and she turns her cheek deeper into the cold ground. _Leave me be._ The pale light of a new day peeks out beneath her closed eyelids; too bright, too clear, too beautiful. She feels something warm, like sunlight, on her face. No. _Let me sleep._

“ _Iris, get up._ ”

That voice…it sounds familiar. Like Marcus’ voice, but this is a gentler tone, encouragement nestled securely within a calm directive. She knows this voice. Where has she heard it before?

“ _Iris, **get up**._ ”

“No…” she whispers, voice broken and barely audible, even to her own ears. _Let me sleep. Let me die._

“ _You must, little wolf._ ”

 _Little wolf?_ No one has ever called her _little wolf_. Others have called her variations, most of them insulting—“little girl” or “little pup”, to name examples—but never that. No one regards her as a wolf. To be a wolf is to be strong, and proud, and graceful and beautiful. To be a wolf is to be a hunter, a leader, a figure worthy of respect and reverence. No one sees her as anything but a misbegotten offspring, better off dead than alive. No one has ever called her a wolf.

Except one.

The sunlight is bright, too bright, against her eyes as she slowly draws them open. Around her, the frost glitters beneath morning light, the barren and dead land is spread as far as the eye can see. Beauty and death, joined together in one strange canvas. And amidst it all, a wolf standing tall on two legs. A wolf wrapped in the flesh of a man, with blue eyes sharp in the light, white hair clean and gleaming, gaze watching and waiting and commanding. Commanding her to stand. Commanding her to live.

“I…I cannot.” She whispers; her voice breaks as though beneath tears, but there are no more tears left. She spent them all last night, in the cold and dark.

“ _You must._ ”

“I cannot.” She repeats, fingers curling tightly within the dirt; it’s rough within her grasp, dead leaves crackling and crumpling. “I am so tired. So cold.”

“ _You are weak. You are tired. You are lost, and you are afraid._ ” He whispers. He doesn’t move, doesn’t step back and doesn’t step closer, just stands perfectly still. “ _But you are not broken. Not beyond repair._ ”

“Yes, I am.”

“ _No, you are not._ ”

“I _am_.” She sobs; the exertion hurts, almost more than she can bear. “Please, just let me sleep. Let me die. Let me be with you and Grandmamma. _Please_ , Grandfather…”

Now, he takes one step forward, a calculated movement, eyes unblinking and unwavering from her. “ _Get up._ ”

“Why?” she appreciates the bitter irony of it, yes; only a months earlier, she was kneeling before her uncle, imploring him for strength, to hold his ground in the face of all his enemies, and here she is, surrendering without a fight and unable to determine just why she shouldn’t. “Why should I? I am hated beyond all comprehension. The city wishes me dead. They will never see me as more than a weak little girl. They will never want me. They will never love me.”

He blinks, lifts his eyebrows just so, and takes one more step closer. “ _Why do you require **their** love,_ ” he says, each word ringing in the silence, “ _when you have **his**?_ ”

The words do not weigh heavy in her heart, nor do they crush her spirit, nor do they deliver the final blow to shatter her heart beyond repair. They settle lightly, deep within her core, and the warmth which begins to spread, seeping outward, filling her veins and melting away the arctic chill of ice, is fire. An ember stirred back to life by nothing more than a gentle touch; a light reborn with only a single match. The life returns to her eyes; she knows this, not because she looks in a mirror, but because she watches him nod and take two steps backwards.

“ _Get up, my little wolf._ ” He says. “ _Rise. Your body may be weak, but your spirit is not. Get up._ ”

To say her body is _weak_ is a gross understatement; if anything, it is her greatest enemy, throbbing violently when she tries to move her arms, and her legs are equally uncooperative. She is forced to stop the attempt, swallow back more tears, more whimpers, more weakness, and then force out a sharp breath. The muscles in both arms burn as she straightens them—slowly, bit by bit—and locks them in place before they crumple beneath her. Both legs are next; it takes her nearly five minutes—and yes, she’s counting them, just to distract from the pain—to get on her knees, and another two minutes to force her weight upright, kneeling on the frost-bitten ground. Her stomach throbs and churns, a vice within her gut trying to break her apart, but she doesn’t look down. Not anymore. Her eyes meet his and hold them without waver. She is strong. She is alive. She is a woman. _I am a wolf._

Her hands clench into fists, nails biting down into the flesh, tiny streams of blood rising, as she rises first on one leg, then the other, every bone in her body fighting and fighting and fighting, every muscle aching and weighed heavy beneath her tattered and bruised skin…and then, finally, breathing heavily and shaking like a newborn, she stands. And she walks.

His eyes have never left hers, nor has she looked away from him, and in the shared gaze much has been exchanged. Now, as she comes closer, each step upon trembling legs and bloodied feet, he opens his arms and waits. Waits, and waits, and waits…and then she falls forward, arms winding tight, clutching herself to him with a broken cry of relief. She has no memory of embracing her grandfather. Being embraced, yes, but he had come too late, when she had already been taught through violence that physical affection was a sin, and she’d never returned his tenderness. She grieves it now, pours out apologies, begs forgiveness, and when she feels warmth encompass her once again, she lets herself believe it is his arms, holding her close once more, for the last time until they meet again.


End file.
